---

Senior UN Official Outlines Vision for Powerful New UN Agency For Women’s Rights

Would "put women’s empowerment and gender equality at the centre of the work of the United Nations"

By Samantha Singson

NEW YORK, August 21, 2006 (C-FAM.org) - A senior advisor to the UN Secretary General has called for a new UN agency for women’s rights. Nafis Sadik, special adviser to the Secretary General and the former executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), is the latest high level UN official to advocate for a pervasive and strengthened mechanism to focus on women’s issues.  In a speech delivered in Geneva recently and released this week, Sadik outlined her vision of a powerful new UN office “to put women’s empowerment and gender equality at the centre of the work of the United Nations, not only at the global level but at the country level as well.”

Sadik criticized nations for not embracing sexual and reproductive health and rights since the Cairo Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Conference on Women in the mid-1990s.  “Leaders will not acknowledge the fundamental importance of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights: it is too sensitive; it is a matter for each country and each culture; it opens up the possibility of sexual license.” In addition to her UN duties, Sadik is an advisor to the pro-abortion lobby Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR).

Sadik’s proposal would bring together all the existing UN women’s agencies and programs to form a Centre for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality, with an executive director reporting directly to the Secretary General. The center would act as “a system-wide watchdog” with the authority to set standards, enforce accountability, and “enabled to be an equal partner at all levels of decision-making from country, regional to the international.”

While acknowledging the work of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) and other UN women’s agencies, Sadik argued that an additional office is needed to “move gender issues to the head of the development agenda.”

Earlier this year, Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and former executive director of UNICEF, also called for another UN women’s agency with UNICEF’s same billion-dollar budget, personnel, and clout. Feminist NGOs such as the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) and Equality Now have championed such proposals and have criticized the UN for not taking action.

Conservative UN experts argue that creating another bureaucracy will help feminists, but will not help women. Dr. Janice Crouse, senior fellow for The Beverly LaHaye Institute, told the Friday Fax "There are already a number of agencies and commissions that focus on women and for decades the feminists have dominated sessions at numerous other UN conferences.  The last thing we need is another venue through which, once again, the Cairo and Beijing agenda can be brought to the forefront. Having another initiative for 'gender equality' would establish another roadblock to having the real needs of women addressed.  Is there no end to the power grabs of the women at the United Nations?"

 Back to Top

---

MORE NEWS: LifeSiteNews.com Home Page  Last 10 Days   Archives   Special Reports

Copyright © LifeSiteNews.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License. You may republish this article or portions of it without request provided the content is not altered and it is clearly attributed to "LifeSiteNews.com". Any website publishing of complete or large portions of original LifeSiteNews articles MUST additionally include a live link to www.LifeSiteNews.com. The link is not required for excerpts. Republishing of articles on LifeSiteNews.com from other sources as noted is subject to the conditions of those sources.